584_Sisters_in_Fantasy.pdf

Sisters in Fantasy

Edited by Susan Shwartz and Marin Greenberg

ROC Books/New American Library

375 Hudson St., NY, NY 10014

ISBN: 0-4514-5292-5

Contents

Hallah’s Choice

Jo Clayton

Wayfinder

Janny Wurts

The Way Wind

Andre Norton

Healer Josepha

Sherman

Firstborn, Seaborn

Sheila Finch

A Game of Cards

Lisa Goldstein

Courting Rites

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Felixity

Tanith Lee

Horse of Her Dreams

Elizabeth Moon

Unto the Daughters

Nancy Kress

Babbitt’s Daughter

Phyllis Ann Karr

Remedia Amoris

Judith Tarr

The Bargain

Katharine Ker

Hallah’s Choice

Jo Clayton

From the Drytowns to Leigh Brackett Hamilton’s Mars, mercenaries and assassins stride or skulk

through exotic desert towns. They are violent and sinister, and, no doubt, each one of them has a history

that we would wonder at—when we’re not taking cover.

Hallah, Jo Clayton’s protagonist, has a history more painful than most. Is she bent on revenge? Yes, but

this is one assassin you can imagine singing a lullaby.

Into the web

Languorous late afternoon.

Heatwaves and a haze of yellow dust.

The Shiza’heyh of Yaanosin ride to the Betrothal Feast and Fealty Jubilee with their guards and

dependents, their wives and daughters and their eldest sons, their equerries and orderlies and grooms,

their harriers and farriers, their agents and their clerks, their stooges and their sycophants, their bath

girls and bed-warmers, their tailors, their valets, their wardrobemasters, their cooks and their

cupbearers, their food tasters and wine tasters, their scullions and slaveys.

The Shiza’heyh Kihyayti’an rides to the Betrothal Feast and Fealty Jubilee with all this and his

unmatched pair of matchless assassins.

Zisgade Neisser the Shadowsnake, unfeeling as the polished ivory blades he wears up each sleeve—he

is a thin gray man, yellow with dust, riding at his master’s side.

Hallah Myur, with no epithet allowed—such things are a foolishness she is content to live without—a

thin gray woman riding near the tail of the procession, a little woman yellow with the rolling dust, dark

eyes narrowed to cracks. Sweat runnels cut through the dust plastered on her brow, baring streaks of

lined light brown skin. Wisps of hair straggle from under her loosely wound headbands. She rides

easily, slumped in the saddle of a dust-yellowed gelding, a long-legged, rough-gaited, slab-sided beast

with enough energy and humor left to white his eyes at clots in the dust and shy at skittering shadows.

She is tired, hot, and bored, with no end of boredom in sight. For the next week or so she’ll be nothing

more than an attendant, a body to dress up the Shiza’heyh’s entourage. Katiang the Boar-rider and the

other cursemen deal hardly with folk who break the Curse Truce, with the hand and the one-behind

who hires the hand. Even Shiza’heyh Kihyayti’an in his maddest moods would not chance bringing the

Curse on his head.

She expects to sleep a lot. She detests crowds, is bored by tumblers, street mimes, magicians, and their

like. She seldom gambles, doesn’t trust luck, only skill. Clothes are to cover her body, food is for

fueling it. She prefers the tablewipe she buys for herself in hedge taverns to the delicate vintages the

Shiza’heyh provides for his favored hirelings. Beyond the highs of her work—which are fewer with

every year that passes—her only real pleasure is a hard-fought game of stonechess. Since Atwarima is a

busy riverport and the Jubilee/Betrothal should bring a flood of visitors from many realms, she hopes to

locate an adequate opponent.

The first shock

In the Bath of the Toyaytay GuestHouse Hallah Myur stripped and stretched, sucking in the steamy air.

She shook her head, her hair tumbling loose, fine long hair kinking into frizzy curls. Her body was

limber as a child’s but terribly scarred, nodules of keloid with streaks of white and pink running

through the soft brown skin where her breasts had been; her back was laced with whip marks.

She sat on damp sacking bound over the bench beside the tub and combed the tangles and dust from

her hair, singing softly to herself, clicking her tongue at how gray she was getting. When she was

finished, she set the comb aside, twisted her hair into a knot atop her head, and slid with a soft purr of

pleasure into the water.

Clean and relaxed, she pulled on her second-best tunic and trousers, tied on the gray silk formveil that

masked her face eye to chin, bound her hair with gray silk bands, covering it completely. She gathered

her dusty riding gear, paid the attendant, left the Bath and strolled toward the rooms assigned to the

Shiza’heyh Kihyayti’an’s entourage, humming a song she’d picked up somewhere, enjoying the

warmth of her body, the easy shift of her muscles.

Though sunset was still half an hour off, in that maze of corridors and galleries within the massive

walls of the GuestHouse, alabaster lamps were already lit, and their painted oils spread perfume on the

drafts that coiled about her shoulders. She turned a corner.

A man walked toward her; his face and shoulders leapt at her as he passed a lamp.

She stopped walking. Stopped breathing.

His eyes passed over her, dismissed her. Under the Curse Truce, assassin’s fangs were pulled. She was

nothing to interest him. Nothing.

His footsteps faded.

Shudder after shudder passed along her body; she hunched over, beat her fists against her thighs,

sucked in air in sharp, broken gasps. Shell twenty years thick shattered in that instant, twenty years of

discipline gone.

But twenty years do have weight and reach.

After a moment she straightened her back, quieted her breathing. Almost running, drowning in

memory, she hurried for the small private cubicle assigned to her.

Rosalie Zivan, fourteen years of mischief, spoiled by a doting father, her mother dead three years ago

birthing Garro Zivan’s last son, the spring moon like laughter in her blood, slipped into the Home-wood

of Roka Membruda to gather herbs for her Auntee Rosamunda’s simples and specifics: Mutes’ tongue,

love-at-ease, moonspurge, sowthistle, hop-over, bruisewort, poorfolks pepper, bee thumb, sucklings tit,

wet-a-bed, shut-your-ear, flickwhittle, whistling fleabane, smartberry, creeping ninny, wart-weed,

stinking willy.

Delighted by the edge of danger in her solitary windings through the wood, she prowled along the deer

paths and in the scattered glades, grubbing in the thick black earth under the trees and along the noisy

creek, knife flickering through the greens, the tubers, the brambles, the grasses growing on the banks

and in the water, filling the gather sack she carried slung over her shoulder.

She ended her search when she reached the rowan pool in the heart of the wood, where the water ran

deep and silent through ancient twisted trees, a place fragrant with the eddying sweetness of night-

blooming jasmine and the acrid bite of riveroak, a place where it seemed to her the dreefolk must dance

on their dreadnights.

She eased the sack onto rowan roots, careful to keep it from the damp dark earth, stripped off her

blouse, her skirt, and her camisole, hung them on a rowan tree, then slipped into the water. The moon

was a hair past full and directly overhead, turning the water to tarnished silver. She sculled dreamily

about, watching the clouds swim by.

A young man came from the trees, blond hair blowing in an aureole about a beautiful lean face. She

knew him. She’d seen him in the village, Membruda’s Youngest Son. They said his name was Traccoar.

“Rowan flower,” he said to her, his voice like a wind in the trees. “Come bless me.”

When she reached her room, she paced back and forth, back and forth, wall to door, around the end of

the bed and back, shivering with reaction. After she’d calmed enough so she could stay still awhile, she

stripped off her clothes, braided her hair, tied the ends, and slipped into bed.

Sleep came hard, and when she did at last drop off, the dreams came back, the ones she thought she’d

left with her name.

Rosalie Zivan lay with hands clenched into fists as Traccoar’s body moved on hers, as he whispered

that she was the loveliest, the most magical being he’d ever known. Most women, he told her between

grunts and other noises, are greedy whores, selling themselves for money and power. You’re different,

he told her, you’re like the earth, rich and powerful, warm and giving.

She was only fourteen, and virgin, but she knew lies when she heard them. She lay like a stone,

gathering herself to run when he rolled off her, before he remembered that he had to kill her so she

couldn’t put a Hammar Curse on him—that was what they believed, those beasts in the Rokas.

The Hammar of clan Gyoker-Zivan had no curses, only wise women and fast-fingered men.

He groaned, rolled over, and lay panting beside her.

She scrambled up, ran around a rowan tree when he leapt to his feet and lunged for her. “Dirty pig,” she

shouted at him. “May you never get it up again.” She ran into the shadows and left him stumbling

clumsily after her, cursing her.

Hallah Myur stirred in her sleep, ground her teeth, and whined like an angry cat; her hands moved up

her body to touch the places where her breasts had been. Tears gathered in her sleeping eyes and leaked

from beneath her lids.

The second shock

The Oath Hall was a vast domed cavity with eight sides and hanging galleries above a forest of arches.

The walls shimmered with color, patterned tiles in red, blue, green. The dome itself was white and

gold; it rested on scrolled, open arches, the morning sunlight streaming through them, gilded with

dancing dust motes. Polished gold stairs rose to a two-level dais at the western wall; a plain, heavy

chair sat on the highest level, made from what rumor said was dragon bones—the Alayjiyah’s Throne.

In front of the dais was a square twenty feet wide of ivory tiles in a golden matrix. On the north side of

that square were three backless ivory chairs with cushions of cloth of gold; on the south side of the

square were three more—set there for the Six Shiza’heyh of Yaanosin.

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